THE CHALLENGE OF CREATING THE PROTOTYPICAL MODEL OF GASTRONOMIC DISCOURSE

Abstract

The article deals with the basic structural, compositional and substantive characteristics of gastronomic discourse in order to create its prototype model. The study has raised issues of the linguistic concept of the term “gastronomic discourse” (hereinafter referred to as “GD”) and its correlation with the terms “gluttonic” and “culinary”, which also gives raise certain limitations regarding their instrumental use in scientific exploration. As it has been found out, the linguosemiotic space of GD is formed by the conceptual sphere “Food”, which are actualized both in separate lexical units, which nominate food, utensils and processes of cooking and consumption, and phraseological units (phraseologisms, proverbs and sayings) with a gastronomic component that accumulates national-specific features of the linguistic picture of the world. Institutional traits allow to present the GD model in the form of a scenario in which participants, chronotope and goal are identified. The communicative space of the GD is shaped by the participants’ language and language units, motives, goals and strategies; other factors include channel, mode, tone and communication styles, as well as non-verbal communication. The text-centric component includes the actual texts (menu, recipe, article) and creole texts with the components of iconic, graphic, audio and video content. The genre variety of GD includes the following subspecies: culinary, advertising, gastronomic, restaurant, expert GD, media GD, scientific-gastronomic and intersects with other types of discourse (commercial, academic, artistic, tourist, legal, etc.). The extralingual context includes socio-cultural dimensions that influence the formation and existence of the GD: cultural and historical meanings (affect the formation of the national cultural personality), traditional and new ways of cooking and consumption, ritual consumption patterns, standards of behaviour (etiquette), gastronomic cultural values and dominants, stereotypes, gender, individual-personalized (prominent chefs) aspect, globalization factor.

Thus, we believe that the attempt to present a prototypical DG model allows, in some way, to systematize current directions and create new ones, which will allow us to immerse into the study of particular aspects of the model to obtain more accurate data. It seems to us that the study of the model of Spanish gastronomic discourse to identify its universal and national-specific features is promising from this point of view.